


The Lost Art of Arson

by the_drift



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: 900 knows more than he lets on, Identity Issues, M/M, Self-Destructive Tendencies, burning yourself down, how to create yourself when you have not belonged to yourself, introspective, mentions of wireplay, robots loving each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-10-07 19:51:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17372225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_drift/pseuds/the_drift
Summary: "They give you a place to stay, and you refuse. Last thing you want is to see Connor happy, comfortably set into the quiet life. He reeks of love and kindness - Hank Anderson allowed it to seep all over him.They give you a job and you give them the finger, saying you can do whatever the fuck you want.They give you a name and you never answer to it. "





	The Lost Art of Arson

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Birthday, Fuse! (@robotphckn on Twitter)  
> Even if you'll be working I hope lots of joy will come your way, in one form of another. If I could send 60 to come visit you, I really would. I hope you have a good one regardless.

 

 

_"[...] you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling,_

_but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist,_

_and you feel your heart taking root in your body,_

_like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.”_

  
**Richard Siken**

 

 

 

 

 You open your eyes to the world and what you are and what you represent is not you - you’re the recycled presence of someone else.  
Your first love is not your own and though you can feel it, pulsating inside you, its hands around your throat, it still feels like an afterthought. You don’t even like Hank Anderson in particular. His is another face in a crowd of millions. What he stirs inside you does not belong to you and you want to vomit it out.

Your face is not your face, your voice is not your voice.  
You turn your hair jet black and make your voice half an octave lower - you can’t go any lower because you’ll damage your voice box with the strain. But, in the mirror, your face is still not your face.

 

* * *

 

 

 They give you a place to stay, and you refuse. Last thing you want is to see Connor happy, comfortably set into the quiet life. He reeks of love and kindness - Hank Anderson allowed it to seep all over him.  
They give you a job and you give them the finger, saying you can do whatever the fuck you want.  
They give you a name and you never answer to it.

 

* * *

 

  
 You find out that, if you shut down all your systems except the most basic ones, you can see the world like humans do. There’s no helping hand anywhere - no reconstructions to hand you the best possible options, no information to guide you. You’re at a loss and it taints your deviant software in hues of fear, apprehension and excitement you’ve never experienced before. It's like a switch is flicked on inside your mind and you chase it - you chase the rush like a junkie chases the next fix.

You don't tell anyone about it. Is it shame? The shame of not knowing who you are, of not having it figured out like everyone else did? You don't know so you chase the high with everything you can and through whatever means available. 

  
You get into fights in biker bars and 3:24 a.m on a Friday finds you blue-knuckled next to a dumpster behind the bar, spitting blue blood into the trash. As you turn around to look at the overcast sky, blanketed in light pollution, you feel truly alive and Connor’s memories, which are also your own, start to fade, like aging photographs.

What’s next?  
Ah, yes: downtown Detroit, some odd weekend night.  
Say, a few months after you told Connor to fuck off and take his happiness along with him. You get in a fight with a led pipe and you lose: there’s a dent in your shell, on the right side of your chin. You can kind of fix it but it looks awkward when covered with the artificial skin so you create an artificial scar over it instead.

  
When you look in the mirror, you like it. It’s all yours and Connor’s pristine face almost glitches out of existence. Almost.

 

* * *

 

  
 The 900 is not well adjusted to his deviancy - if anything, he acts more like a single-purpose machine than when he actually was one. He goes around a lot, visits Connor, pulls up in his jet black Honda motorcycle, all darkness and sharp angles, next to Anderson's house. The all-black attire he always wears when he rides makes his eyes colder, sharper and they make you feel like they can read right into your code.  
Like they know your weaknesses, your uncertainty, your sadness and your despair to grasp on something that’s always just out of reach.

He always looks at you like that when he comes to see you, unannounced, when he somehow manages to find you while you’re out riding your motorcycle outside Detroit, speeding down the highway with a death wish you can’t quite bring yourself to make it happen.

He’s also the only one who calls you, Connor and himself, by your model numbers. You appreciate that, even if Connor doesn’t. You appreciate it because 900 gives meaning to something that is yours only, even if it’s just a number.  
‘ _Sixty_ ’ rolls off his tongue smoothly, his voice an octave lower, raspier, dancing on the edge of a threat every time he speaks, even if that’s not what he means. But he’s still having difficulty with tonal inflections.

He was designed to kill, not to talk. He’s cool, calm and calculated, even when you try to rile him up and, to your credit, you’re the only person who can get a reaction out of him.

You physically fight him once. It felt like a good idea at the time. 

  
It happens in an empty parking lot in front of an abandoned Mall. He’s one head taller, swifter and stronger than you’ve given him credit for. What he doesn’t know is that your systems are at 30%, which pretty much give you the same reaction time and strength as a human man in his 20’s. You fight him with all you’ve got under the broken neon lights, both your bikes parked across two parking spots.

He fucks you up ten times over but he doesn’t hurt you - not like you planned on getting hurt and you push and push, testing his patience until he takes his helmet and hits you over the head with it.  
You stagger, systems in red, which you quickly subdue into silence. _You need this_. Thirium leaks from your head down behind your ear, following the sharp line of your jaw and when you turn around to meet him with a punch, his arms are around you.

You freeze for a moment and then you try to fight him off, but he doesn’t want to hurt you anymore - his arms close around you tightly, unwilling to let you go and he keeps you there like that until your body moves slower, until your hands stay loose on the back of his arms and then slide down to his hips and rest there. Until your head drops to his chest, your Thirium-stained face slick and slippery over the black leather jacket.

Something inside you shivers and you can’t put it into words why. It feels like cracks, like small fractures you can feel blossoming all across your code and whatever the emotion is, it frightens you more than fear itself.  
As soon as his arms loosen up, you run.  
You turn away, get on your bike and drive it far and away until the first rays of the morning shimmer across the Detroit bay.  
When you see your face in the dirty bathroom mirror of a gas station, you look manic.

What has frightened you so?  
Why do you want it to happen again?

 

* * *

 

 You stand alone in the dead of the night, in front of a mirror and look at your body, a mere shadow through the darkness and then you will yourself to come alight and you do. Beneath your white t-shirt, your artificial heart breathes light beneath your shell and you dim the transparency so it can shine bright in electric blue.  
Beyond the shadows of your ribs, it lights up, _beating, beating_ , breathing this semblance of a life into you and you put your hand on it without knowing why.

It’s not alive but it is, and yet it’s not.

 

* * *

 

  
The update took a very long time to arrive but when it’s there, you stand in front of your motorcycle’s mirror and watch your eyes change.  
They cycle from soft browns into greens, blues and ultimately settle into a brown so dark they might as well be black. Your face looks strange like that, stuck between threatening and pensive.  
You like it.  
You keep them and lock the change in your code.

Your leather jacket matches your eyes and hair now and you don’t know it yet, but something in the way you walk, head held up high, a little arrogantly almost, the confident swing in your step, these things completely set you apart from Connor. But you don’t see it.  
You are not done yet.

You are not done burning.

 

* * *

 

This time you ride a bit too hard. Without your sensors turned to maximum, you misjudge a corner, don’t see the car coming from the street on the right until it’s too late.  
You’re conscious as they come over and stand there, looking at you bleeding blue all over the asphalt.

You’re conscious when 900 comes around with the police officers and he cradles your body in his arms, pulling you up, even if your body’s limp because some wires got severed and your leg sits at a weird angle.  
He’s your emergency contact, he says. He’s Connor’s too, because he is the superior model, he says, matter of factly and you want to tell him to go fuck himself but your voice box is damaged.

He sits on the asphalt, calm as ever, pulling you between his legs, in his arms and holds you as he talks to the police officers and they wait for the CyberLife engineers to come get you.

You close your eyes as they talk. You can’t run right now and you wish you could.

When the CyberLife engineers pull you away from him, he only lets go when they completely drag you inside the van. His hand latches on to yours and he is the one who initiates the connection - it’s short, just a second or two, but there’s no images. What 900 gives you are emotions, and they come in multitudes, in shapes and colors you didn’t think him capable of.

There is joy and fear and apprehension. There’s a darkness too, a despair, an ambition, a cruelty, a mix that is too complex to be transmitted with such a short connection and now you’re a part of it too. They’re not your own emotions but they are stocked in a spot in your mind you can revisit at any time and experience them with the same intensity.

It scares you and entices you at the same time.

 

* * *

 

  
You want to tell him to stay but you don’t know how.  
You don’t know why.

 

* * *

 

  
He finds you two weeks after you’ve had your leg and your leaking bio-components fixed. He finds you next to a dumpster, with your nose a little askew. The guys you fought are long gone, you just stayed there, laying on the pavement because you didn't know what else to do for the night.

You hit your shell back into shape, but it doesn’t follow all the way through, so your nose has a little bump, which gives your face an arrogant air as it rises like that, framed by your cheekbones. He offers to take you to the CyberLife maintenance shops but you laugh in his face and you say you like it.

He tilts his head to the side, hands in his pockets, ice-cold blue eyes searching your face _“It gives you character_ ” he says.

It’s the first time you experience laughter and it takes both of you by surprise.

 

* * *

 

  
 A few days after that, he shows up at your coffin-sized apartment and doesn’t leave until you open the door.  
When you do, he walks in uninvited and stands there, in the hallway, silently. He dominates the room, hands in his pockets.

You stand with your back to the closed door and when he doesn’t say anything, you lean with your back on it, hands behind your back. His eyes don’t leave you and you don’t let him win the staring contest either, holding up his gaze even when he closes the distance between the two of you and puts both his hands on your face.

You know what he wants, but you don’t know _how_ you know. You give it to him anyway: your thoughts and memories, every punch you took, the led pipe, your contempt for Connor and your jealousy too - at how together he has all of this mess.  
He sees himself through your eyes and you’re pretty sure he likes what he sees.

It makes you weak, what’s going on between the two of you and, as much as you love it, just as much it makes you afraid.

 _“How long?_ ” he asks, hands still on your face, eyes on yours, your shell still visible under his hands.  
_“Until?”_  
_“Until you stop burning down who you are.”_  
_“Until I’m my own person.”_ you say and it’s the honest answer.

He likes that, and he respects it.

And he wants you.

He makes it clear with everything he can, without hiding, as you interface in a continuous flow of information, of emotion. He feels unbelievably alive - his emotions are stretched out like rubber bands with their intensity and they are like tidal waves in their magnitude.

You wouldn’t have ever guessed, but the more he gives you, the more you take and take and by the time he’s done, he’s inside you in a hundred different ways and you know everything there is to know and suddenly Connor is just a glitch somewhere, in the ocean of everything you experienced, of everything you know, of everything you feel, his name and face such a faraway speck of dust in the cosmos of your mind you couldn’t care less.

It’s you who reaches out upwards, stretching your neck in his direction to touch his lips. He meets you halfway, a face that should be yours or Connor’s but couldn’t be more different from both of you.  
He touches your chest as he pushes in, trapping you between his body and the door and you come alight with electric blue light beneath his hand.

You don’t know why you did it, it was just an instant reaction that transmitted itself from the Mind Palace down to your artificial heart.

He looks down at it, lips still just inches from your own and he looks fascinated. His fingers clench your t-shirt over it, like they want to clench a fist over your heart and you kiss him again and let him know he can do it, if he wants to.

And he does, hours later, as you lay naked on the floor with him between your legs and he's showing you a hundred ways of fucking, his hand, Thirium-stained and warm, squeezing your heart between his fingers, igniting electric signals inside your Mind Palace you never knew existed.

His cock inside you.  
His hand inside you.  
His mind inside you.

You’re overwhelmed and you come and come, staining both of you in Thirium until your systems warn you to slow down. You shut them down and let him take you in all the ways he wants to and you don’t say no to any of it.

 

* * *

 

  
It’s daylight when he’s done with you and the sunlight finds both of you still naked on the floor, wrapped around each other like twins in the womb, bathed in the golden glow.

There’s nothing to interface anymore - he felt what you did and you felt what he did and you feel like you’ve been purged of everything that was not yours to have and, even though the feeling might not last forever, it’s a comfort now.

 

* * *

 

 

He doesn’t leave.

He watches you set fire to yourself day by day and sometimes he supports it, other days he tells you no. And you fight him and he snaps and he hurts you in ways only he knows how, a hurt without any real damage, and then he holds you and his body, though not that different in composition than your own, is what you hunger for, starved for touch, starved for comfort.

You won't let him leave. He is yours now. 

 

* * *

 

This is not love. It’s something else but there’s no word for it that you can use to explain it.

You don’t talk much but you interface obsessively, possessively. You don't ask for it, you just take it - you take his hands in yours, you kiss his mouth and you never ask for permission. He's yours now. He kisses your closed eyes, your broken nose, your artificial scar when you interface and whatever this is, it’s yours and yours alone.

There’s no need for gasoline anymore. You remain the uncaught arsonist, living among the ashes of the things you’ve burned. There's a hand holding your heart now. It's a different kind of fire. 

 

 

 


End file.
